FWIW I took this soon after the release of MSFS 2020.
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Hmm, those videos actually do seem to show what I think I’m remembering.
In lower altitude flying I recall the earlier days of 2020 having views similar to what I’ve seen between 1,000 to 10,000 feet in real life. Especially around sunrise and sunset.
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Is it some kind of crime to self-reflect and consider I may be wrong? Memories are fallible.
But the videos hobanagerik shared show what I’m talking about.
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I don’t shoot nearly enough footage, for no other purpose than for reference. Difficult to be gaslit if you have video evidence.
I started with micrologic’s version on a TRS-80 so I only got wireframe at about 1 frame per second if you were lucky. Meigs field was your only choice 
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Your videos do show what I’m talking about. While the ground does look way better in 2024, the atmospheric visuals had more detail and realism in the early 2020 days. I remember being shocked at seeing the clouds and light reflections look like I’ve seen in real life.
I have real-life memories of seeing brilliant orange sunsets lighting up the sky and reflecting off every bit of water below. I couldn’t tell where the sky and ground even met. It was a full 360 spherical sunset. I saw the same thing happen on occasion in the early days of 2020. But nothing since has captured those moments.
Now clouds are more uniform and mushier up close. There is less detail and less light play.
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There was a lot of good in the 2020 clouds and cloud layouts and I’d love to still have those things today. But they’ve changed it a lot and I often wonder what is supposed to be so much better about this new method/approach or whatever it is that is obviously different.
There are things to like in the FS24 skies. I’ve seen some very realistic looking scenes but there continue to be things I consider to be downright ugly and un realistic. Still hoping for improvements.
For me though, it stops with clouds and layouts (aka weather) – because the daytime lighting in FS24 is fantastic and quite real imo. I love predawn and postsun but theres issues where they ‘meet’ with daytime.
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I totally agree. That’s why I am only flying MSFS 2020. Even after a clean install I cannot get '24 to run without crashing. I have run out of tricks. 2020 gives me 99.998% of what I am looking for.
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Think part of it is that we’ve got used to the large step change in graphics we had when 2020 came out compared to previous versions and another is that we’re the current levels of graphics is just the norm so we’re not as impressed as we were once.
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I just wanted to be sure: is this in 2020 or 2024?
I’m intrigued by this. Are there any before/after comparisons anywhere?
Well said man! I am sure about it!
if you mean mine, they are just a few screenshots i took of some live weather recently in 2024
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I don’t remember weather looking this good in 2020, not without paying for 3rd party add-ons.
This is in 2024, dodging storms just south of Lake Okeechobee in Florida. Live weather, all settings on ultra.
This is departing KRSW in the FSW Lear 35A
I’ve got a ton of others as well. When there’s weather imo it’s better overall than 2020. I sometimes purposely look for poor conditions when choosing airports
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Thanks yes.
I find this one of the annoying things of the forum: if your reply is immediately below the post you are replying to there is no indication if you are replying to the post above or just making a general comment/question. A small thing for sure and yes, you can make the appropriate deduction, but why not just show which post you are replying to in all cases?
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Actual vs live sim weather a couple hours ago. I live in Abbotsford, BC, Canada. Real life weather photographs taken from our house:
Looking towards CYXX Abbotsford:
Looking south-east
Looking south
In the sim - duh! 
- on the runway looking roughly east
Looking north-east towards our house
Airborne looking east. The base was around 3,500ft
On top. Tops were just below 9,000ft
Cloud base is typically rather dark in 2024 so certainly not perfect. The base in the sim is also showing less texture than real life, which is contrary to the common “puffball” criticism. Even so, I think it is a reasonably fair representation if all you have to go by is a METAR. I find this acceptable
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100%
The graphics have been slowly dumbed down since SU5 of 2020.
And 2024 just looks so cartoony compared to 2020 at release. Especially the clouds which have terrible LOD and a lot of completely unrealistic blobs rather than accurate cloud shapes.
It’s shocking how the graphics have got worse since release but still performance has also got worse. But yet we have much better hardware, and frame generation….
The mind boggles.
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